


We Hunt Those Who Hunt Others

by cptsuke



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8326798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cptsuke/pseuds/cptsuke
Summary: By the time Stiles is twenty-two he’s lost most of those he loves; more headstones in the cemetery than close friends.But maybe there's something he can do to keep what he's got left safe.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I accidently a fic many moons ago, which i recently found. A death fic. Where everyone I love dies. Except for Stiles. Because that’s how I show my love. I kill mostly everyone he loves. So yes, warnings for dark!fic and major character death and how long it had been since I put words together in a story sort of setting and holy shit IDEK.  
> set post s2, written before s3 in that golden time when we still thought everyone would be around forever.

 

By the time he’s twenty-two he’s lost most of those he loves; more headstones in the cemetery than close friends.

Sheriff Stilinski dies two weeks after Stiles turns eighteen and he isn’t even there. The attack comes from nowhere and even after it’s perpetrator is caught - _torn apart_ \- nothing is the same.

His headstone is the same pearl-sheened light grey as his mother’s, with a Beacon Hill County Sheriff’s star embossed on top.

Stiles screams for _hours_ , his throat and voice box giving out just after the first hour ticks over. Someone holds him - restrains him - tight arms wrapped around him as he sits bonelessly on the grass.

Later lips will press against his temple and desperation and grief and all those nameless sorrows that can rip a person’s soul will ebb for that brief, brief moment and Stiles will know that he will never let go of the one holding him.

 

They take his head.

 _Stiles._ His last words - word - every emotion under the sun pumped into that one meaningless and ever-so-meaningful group of letters, his stupid red eyes so intense and flashing and, and, and then he’s gone.

They don’t bother with Stiles - the blade in his chest has him pretty much done for - they jeer as the body in front of him falls to the ground like a puppet with cut strings, before they leave one plants his foot next to the blade sticking out of Stiles’ back and _shoves_.

It doesn’t even look like Derek anymore, he thinks, slumped on the ground watching his blood snake away from his body.

This is the first time in the last six years he’s been okay with the fact that his life expectancy has been drastically shortened.

Staring at the ground with one eye and the little he can see with the other, Stiles waits to die.

 

When he wakes up Derek’s been dead for six weeks.

His headstone is smooth shale with just his name and dates sunk into the shiny surface.

Scott toes the grass and stares at his feet, mumbling _we didn’t know what to put on it_.

And, well, Stiles doesn’t know either. Because all the words in the world will never ever be enough or _right_.

 

Doctors express surprise at how much damage he’s managed to sustain and still be alive; either his nicked heart and massive blood loss should’ve spelt the end but instead he’s got a throbbing pain in his chest, and all he can think is that maybe he’s not dead because without Derek he doesn’t need his heart anymore.

Yes. Stiles’ has gotten so morose he’s practically Byronic. It’s something he’d make fun of if he wasn’t so damned dead inside.

He doesn’t want to live in this world anymore.

So he does the next best thing and shuts down. Scott and Allison bundle him up into the pack’s newest home, and he ghosts through life, picking at whatever food is placed in front of him, curling up in the corner of the couch and sleeping. Good, bad, not at all, all the time. God, all he does is be tired and sleep.

 

Life seems to turn to dull shades of grey, broken sporadically by garish dreams that invade and take root in his mind.

Sometimes he dreams of fire; like Derek’s gone but left all his fucked up nightmares all to Stiles.

Those dreams leave him disoriented and he has to avoid the kitchen, the sounds of the pack _living_ grating on his nerves with the wrongness of it all; because _didn’t everyone burn_?

Sometimes he dreams and he can’t see anything - just dark murky shadows - and there’s this sound. A sound that sounds like a lopsided ball rolling. Only it’s not a ball. It's bloody and. and. and...

He wakes from those dreams with vomit and bile in his mouth and tear tracks on his face.

Sometimes he dreams his mother and father and Derek, sitting at the dinner table of his childhood, and they’re waiting, waiting, _waiting_.

He wakes from those dreams mumbling _wait, wait, I’m coming, please, wait_ and every wolf in the house watch him all day with sad, sad eyes.

 

Scott inherits Derek’s red eyes - his sudden promotion to alpha a surprise even to him - but it sort of makes sense. After a lot of thinking. And soul searching. And finally glumly admitting that _Scott_ is the best choice. He’s not the strongest, not the most in control nor the smartest. But for every fault, he has a counterpoint; a willingness to give and accept help, to listen to others, to _trust_ , to never give up and to somehow come out on top.

Erica has a different theory; _it’s clear now that even the universe is against us, if it’s giving Scott the reins_.

 

One day - months, maybe a year, he just doesn’t know, later - Allison sits down beside him. She’s got her _I want to say something but I don’t know where to start and I don’t want you to take it badly_ face on.

“Do you mind if I sit here?” She asks, sitting already. She’s being so very carefully polite that Stiles wonders if someone’s dying.

“He doesn’t want me to tell you, he’s,” She’s definitely talking about Scott, no one else can coax that level of fondness and exasperation from Allison. “He’s worried about you.”

She’s talking in circles and rubbing the material over her belly button like she’s worried there’s a build up of lint hiding in it. Stiles wants to tell her not to worry, Scott probably loves it, hell Scott would probably try to _adopt_ any belly button lint Allison deigned to let him find.

“But you deserve to know. _First_.”

She looks down at her hands, and, oh. _Oh_.

He laughs. It scratches his unused throat and comes out less joyful than he means but he can’t stop.

Colour floods in - dizzyingly - and Allison looks like she’s broken him. Stiles reaches out and holds her warm, warm hand and brings it close; he presses a kiss to her knuckles like a prayer.

Derek would’ve smiled - would’ve hugged _Scott_ \- and Stiles is going to have to do all that for him and more because it’s been too damned long since _born_ werewolves ran the forests of Beacon Hills. He laughs again, feeling tears running down his face but not caring because Allison was smiling and laughing and crying and any moment now the room was going to be full of bewildered werewolves and Stiles holds tight to her hand.

Derek would love this. Scott is going to be the goofiest father ever. _Stiles_ is going to love this.

Scott’s looking sheepishly at the pair of them from the doorway, pink tinging his ear tips like he’s realising that everyone’s going to totally know that he and Allison are _doing_ _it_ because he’s an adult and the alpha but still the same kid that decided to be Stiles' best friend all those years ago.

Allison _Argent_ is going to have a little baby wolf cub. And it’s such a hilarious ironic twist; like the Terminator came back in time and totally boned Sarah Connor instead. He can totally see Scott rocking Sarah Connor’s fluffy eighties ‘do.

His mouth opens to tell Scott exactly that when he suddenly realises exactly what it means, that Allison is an Argent and Scott is a werewolf.

No one is going to love this

And he can’t breathe.

 

There is a code.

 _Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent_.

Governed by honour.

 _Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent_.

**No one follows the fucking code.**

 

The first ones that come for their peaceful life aren’t subtle. They blow into town like a rebel motorcycle club - all posturing and loud words and no subtlety to be found - and when they make their move it’s clumsy and ill prepared.

They don’t even get close to the barely pregnant Allison, stake out the _Pack’s_ home and somehow manage to not only miss the fact that she doesn’t actually live there, but also that it’s populated primarily by testy werewolves that have a serious hate-on for overzealous hunters. Or any hunters in general, really.

Stiles is on the couch - researching on a laptop precariously balanced on his knees - when they drove an SUV through the front of the house; as plans go, Stiles’ is pretty sure it’s so bad that all of the pack's past fuck up's would trump them. And they've made _a lot_ of fuck ups.

It does get points for shock factor though. Even if that just means they have time to get out of the car before being profoundly trounced by three angry werewolves.

Stiles doesn’t even have to get up.

They are the first. But they are not the last.

 

After the fourth time (old school werewolves that seem to think they have any say in who Scott procreates with), head pounding, heart skipping every second beat and breath coming out shorter and shorter Stiles makes his way to Chris Argent; currently keeping a cell warm in Corcoran Prison, in what Stiles can only imagine is sort of a ‘time-out’ for the not as murderous and callous as every-freaking-one else hunter.

Stiles lays the facts out, bare and plain, and tells him he wants to know how to stop Beacon Hills’ sudden influx of homicidal hunters. Argent listens intently, his face flickering between a careful blank expression and genuine worry for his daughter.

“I can’t help you.” He says when Stiles’ spiel runs out of steam.

“You have to. They’re going to _kill_ her.”

Argent’s forehead presses against the plexiglass, eyes closing and he whispers _Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent_ over the phone.

“THAT’S BULLSHIT!” Stiles screams, spit flecking the plexiglass as he slams a fist against it. Chris Argent at least has the courtesy to look shocked.

As he’s dragged away from the room, Stiles can’t help but think that maybe he’s gotten what he needs.

 

_Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent_

 

Instead of just hoping that the next hunter or magical creature that passes through adheres to a code that’s more ‘hold your breath as you pass a graveyard’ than law, instead of hoping like optimistic children desperate to see the good in everyone, maybe there should be someone enforcing it.

A code that can twisted and contorted and coloured so it fits whatever belief is popular that day is no code at all.

 

Stiles has never been what good at not judging people. Always been quite happy to give his opinion no matter how harsh it comes out. His ability to be so damned loveable while saying _we should leave him to die in the street_ would be a mystery to anyone who actually thought about it. But no one does. Because Stiles is the person who throws himself into the fray without anything but a love for his friends and a vague hope of _don’t let me die today_ to see him through.

Underneath that is a very hard person. He’s never thought that before. Stiles has always been _Stiles_ , loose of limb and free with wisecracks, his mental image of himself is kind of skewed.

That is until there’s a hunter with a gun full of bullets that he fully intends to unload into the unborn Baby McCall’s mother standing in front of Stiles demanding to know where the wolfslut was.

This one is number five. And he is much better than the others.

Stiles is going buy fish sticks and brownies and _oh can you get those little packets of chocolates?_ ; listening to Allison list every food she thinks she might want and trying to lock the jeep while keeping his phone pressed against his ear - because last week he forgotten to buy more PB&J and Allison had looked at him like he’d kicked a puppy and he’s pretty sure Scott started crying and how is this his life?

Then he realises he’s left his wallet in the car, mumbles _call you back_ , sighs - his life is hard - unlocks the door again and retrieves his wayward wallet. Then that’s as far as he gets because suddenly there’s a person behind him, shoving him head first into the steering wheel.

He blinks, and a hand pulls roughly at the collar of his shirt - flipping him over - so he’s face to face with a very benign looking man with a not even a little bit benign looking gun in his hand. Behind him his partner watches the disturbingly empty car lot with a practiced eye.

“Don’t do anything stupid, kid, you know what we want.”

There’s a lug wrench in the passenger’s side foot well - he’d gotten a flat three days ago in the pouring rain and Isaac had gotten to play jack in lieu of Stile’s apparently completely missing one while Erica had supervised unhelpfully from inside where it was decidedly not cold, wet and raining - the tip of it presses uncomfortably into his elbow.

If he picks it up this will only end one way.

This nice looking man with a friendly face and insanity in his eyes wants to kills his best friend’s wife; hell, sometimes Stiles thinks Allison might be beating Scott in the best friend department.

_If the limb is diseased, remove the limb._

 

Later he’s sitting in the back of an ambulance; the coroner zips a body into thick black plastic, Deputy Mitchells takes careful photos of his fucked up bloody hands and the world flashes red then blue then red, over and over.

Somewhere in the crowd his friends - _family_ \- hover but for now he’s isolated and he’s absurdly grateful for it.

It gives him time to collect his thoughts together, to put the blood spattered memories into a box and shove it into the deep recesses of his mind. And it gives The One That Got Away time to actually get away, because he knows if the pack know there’s another, there very soon will not be.

 _Run. Fucking run and remember your fucking_ **_code_ ** _. Remember it because pretty soon it’s going to be law._

Stiles had been so angry he could barely push the words through clenched teeth; fists clutching the hunter’s shirtfront with white knuckles and the man had looked at Stiles like he was a monster. It’s funny how little that bothers him.

 _Tell whoever you want. Because if you people can’t. If you_ **_people_ ** _can’t be decent human beings on your own, I will_ **_make_ ** _you. I swear to god I will hunt down every one of you self righteous bastards, until the only code you know is if you fuck up - if you decide that killing_ **_children_ ** _is somehow the_ **_right_ ** _thing to do - I will be there, and you won’t do a fucking thing ever again. I will remove every goddamned one of you_ **_infections_ ** _._

And Stiles had let him go and he’d run, blood trailing down his smashed arm, the hunter had run and never looked back.

He thinks that maybe this both a beginning and an end.

 

His mother, father and Derek are still sitting at the dining table. Are still waiting. Guilt and longing burn in the back of Stiles’ throat and he asks them to wait _just a little longer._

 

Erica comes with him. Righteous anger burns deep in her bones and her desire to hurt others, as she has been hurt, is tempered by it.

He hates her a little and loves her a lot; her personality and psyche so closely wrapped into Derek’s that he can’t help but pick at his feelings about _that_. Like burnt nerve endings slowly healing, shards of emotion stab at him at the most random of times; his chest aching and all he can think is this broken rib feeling is what’s left of his love?

 

At first they travel aimlessly, more stumbling into situations and people in need of mediation than actively hunting for them.

 

“He would hate how sad you are.” She says one day, staring resolutely out her window at the passing scenery.

“I am not sad.” Because he isn’t; he just has broken ribs, it hurts to breathe, hurts to run, hurts to laugh and if he fucks up too much they’ll stab into his lungs and he’ll drown in pain.

“Yes. Yes you are.” She says it quietly, and then falls silent for the rest of the day.

 

Word travels - both good and bad, _Law Maker_ they call him - and soon they’re actively sort out. When Stiles started this he’d not planned on _helping_ people. Not in a way that didn’t end and start with threats and violence.

But instead he finds himself sitting in a circle of werewolves listening to the alpha explain their territorial problems with a hunter community across the valley. And he actually _talks_ them into a peaceful agreement.

Erica laughs at him from Oregon to Utah.

 

They burn a hunter alive in Saint Louis and put two wolf bane bullets into a werewolf’s skull two hours down the road.

Nothing they do could as bad as what the trail of hell the two killers had left behind.

Erica scrawls _Nous chassons ceux qui nous chassent_ across the brick wall behind the hunter, and etches a spiral into the ground around the werewolf’s body.

They don’t want the supernatural community to think these people were killed randomly; anonymity is not the point here.

 

They gain two recruits in San Diego; two whip smart shape shifters with chips on their shoulders and bright eyes that belie all their tough words of revenge and retribution.

Soon there’s others - humans, shifters, a witch; a _pack_ almost - spreading across five states. And that’s freaking amazing to Stiles if he ever stops and looks at what he and Erica have created. Five regulated states where the code is not only in place but also completely and _forcibly_ enforced.

 

They set up a sort of office in Beacon Hills; a glorified room really. Lydia helps with the set-up - tutting at anything Stiles does and promptly taking over _everything_ which she somehow manages to do despite being in the middle of writing a thesis on something lengthy and math-y that makes little to no sense to Stiles. Danny visits one day with her and declares them to be in the eighteenth century when it comes to electronics and starts running the web based side in his spare time. Jackson begrudgingly offers to help out and then basically takes over regulating North California by himself. While Boyd quietly but firmly takes on the area south of Los Angeles.

They’re never really there, weren’t supposed to be except somehow they end up dropping by every couple of days for a few days; with their friends close by and tiny Hayley demanding her Uncle Stiles and Aunt ‘Rica, and well, little baby McCall is hard to say no to.

They’ve made enemies of course, from both sides of the fence, whether it’s the working together – wolf and human – or the occasional siding with hunters, or their quick and non-prejudicial executions, so many different things that all come down to the fact that no one can quite believe that someone out there has the _audacity_ to think they can make laws for the supernatural.

We’re _audacious_ , he tells Erica with a shit eating grin at least twice a week, sometimes more if it’s been spit into their faces recently.

And maybe they are a little.

 

Footsteps sound behind him one day while his head is stick in seventeenth century literature that will hopefully set a precedent for the pack of selkies that have resurfaced after hundred of years of hibernation in a set of lakes north of Reno of all places – they’re surprised, the town folk are surprised, Stiles is surprised, _everyone is surprised_ \- but now some sort of treaty has to be shoved together and _what even_ , couldn’t they just go back to sleep until humans had killed themselves all off? Or at least until it wasn’t Stiles’ problem?

The footsteps behind him step closer.

“I’m coming, I told you I was coming, I just wanted to check this first.” He mutters to the person behind, presuming it’s Erica, pissed because hours have past since she left for Scott and Allison’s and he’s totally supposed to be there _now_.

A hand roughly grabs at his collar - and people wonder why his shirts always hang funny – and spins him around.

Okay. Not Erica.

They’re just _humans_ \- Cocksure, egotistical and so fucking breakable - standing in front of him like they’re actually a threat to him. Stiles has been running with wolves since he was _sixteen_ , half of these hunters look like they’ve only just discovered which end of a gun is the bad touch end.

“We’re looking for the Law Maker, where’s your wolf, kid?” One demands as the other crowds into Stiles’ personal space and, well now, that’s just insulting.

“I, ah, don’t you, how, _what_?” He sputters because for once he’s actually at a loss for words. He’s always been pretty visible. He has. Hasn’t he? How are these people even here if they don’t know what they’re looking for is sitting in from of them?

“Kill him, that’ll send a pretty clear message.” One says, cold words at odds with the way he’s nonchalantly looking around the office.

He’s going to die, twenty-four years old with ropey white scars from claws that wrap around his torso and a ratty old red hoody that’s too short in the sleeves, his _knees_ are still knobbly and he’s going to be killed by people who want him but don’t even know who he is.

That’s kind of all kinds of hilarious.

 

There’s a bullet just above his hip and his head hurts and his phone is broken and dammit, where the hell is Erica? He stumbles out the doors, into the street, determined to find his jeep and his backup cell phone when he realises there are wolves on the road.

Four werewolves that are definitely not his wolves.

He’s dead. There’s just no other way this can end. He’s barely standing and he’s unarmed except for a flick knife in his back pocket that was fine against the hunters but may as well be a candy cane for all the good it’ll do against shapeshifters. So he does the only thing he can think of and waves at them before ducking back into the building. Because his flimsy wooden door is totally going to make them hesitate. He deadbolts it and pretends that makes him all the more safer as he limps back up the stairs. He can do this. _If_ he can get to the main office area he’ll have weapons and _if_ time allows, a mountain ash circle.

Wood splinters behind him and he mentally cheers his door on for standing against the first hit, one point for flimsy wooden door.

Then he trips on the last step and tumbles back down half of them. The door gives one last rallying rattle then shatters into splinters.

 

Erica was right all along; the universe was indeed against them.

 

Claws scrape his ankle as he scrabbles back up the stairs; scrapes but don’t manage to get a grip. There’s a yelp from outside, growling that would be more audible if the entire stairwell wasn’t filled with growling; everything seems to pause and that gives him the split second he needs to get away.

Stiles slams the far more reinforced office door on their snarling snouts and lets himself have a moment of relief. They’ll get through it eventually, but he’s bought himself at least a few minutes

The werewolves are quick - _so fast_ \- but they don’t quite move like _pack_ , like every one of them has a separate agenda despite all being here for one thing; and it’s that that gives Stiles the slightest edge. And if the noises he thinks he might’ve heard is anything to go by, the pack - _his pack_ \- is totally fucking up everyone’s shit. He just needs to find somewhere to hole up and hope his lot find him before the others do.

 

He’s got the wall at his back when Erica breaks the door down, flick knife out even if its next to useless, panting as he simultaneously celebrates being alive for another day and tries to convince his lungs and heart that he is totally going to die if they don’t calm the fuck down.

“How you doing, Batman?”

She asks with a grin, crouching in front of him.

His office is currently populated by wolfed out friends and mostly dead bodies of all sorts, but on the other hand he’s almost completely sure he’s not bleeding to death. He lets his head rolls back, a smile splitting his face as he laughs.

“Can’t complain.”

 

He thinks sometimes that maybe Derek would hate what he’s become. His hands are steeped in blood and he doesn’t see a foreseeable future where they aren’t. He accepts that. He’s not blaming anyone, but if things had been different this path would not have been the one he’d have walked.

 

This thing is just starting.

Baby steps.

A Law Maker and his Regulators.

_Nous chassons ceux qui chassent d’autres_

_We hunt those that would hunt others_

 

His mother, father and Derek sit at the dining table. Waiting.

And Stiles asks them to wait a little longer, and thinks maybe they’ll understand.

These are the people who loved him most; they’ll wait as long as it takes.

 


End file.
